Weiss Manfredi, Public Natures

An essay by Weiss Manfredi, an american multidisciplinary design firm, on infrastructures incorporating cultural or recreational functions

Infrastructural systems are the enduring forms of urban evolution, multiplying as cities grow and requiring expanding swaths of territory to accommodate more and more monofunctional requirements. As the very momentum of exchange incrementally overwhelms our urban landscapes, we wonder what new forms of public nature might emerge if highways, communication right-of-ways, flood-resistant structures, railways, subway lines, and distribution grids were to become institutions of culture and recreation. Larger than life but part of it, infrastructure has an immediate presence; it shapes our environment and urban life in vital, authentic, and often messy ways. Tabula-rasa beginnings are rare for cities; hence, infrastructure, of both movement and culture, must evolve and activate preexisting conditions. Highway, subway, utility lines, and teledata networks have the capacity to sever or connect communities, define the static or fluid identity of an urban landscape, and unravel or re-stitch the increasingly fragmented fabric of our metropolitan world. The allure of this new public territory lies in its activation of a range of scales, its sectional opportunities for the simultaneous accommodation of movement and destination, and the hybrid programmatic potentials it affords.

The Seattle Olympic Sculpture Park emerged from the unlikely proposition of turning three separate parcels of contaminated land, divided by train lines and highways, into a waterfront public space for the display of art. The project is a continuous Z-shaped landform concealing and revealing the roadways and train lines below, creating valleys, bridges, ramps and walkways, beginning at the urban edge with a pavilion for art and concluding at the water’s edge with a newly created beach (Photo by Benjamin Benschneider)

We look at the physical elements of infrastructure and the often marginalized sites they produce as possible contributors to a meaningful public realm. What if a new paradigm for infrastructure existed? What if the very hard lines between landscape, architecture, engineering, and urbanism could find a more synthetic convergence? We are interested in a new model of practice that integrates all fields of design through yet-to-be-codified protocols – a synthesis residing at the periphery of disciplinary definitions but perhaps at the center of a wholly new form. We imagine a definition for an evolutionary infrastructure that is both projective and pragmatic – an intrinsically agile prototypical ideal, capable of optimizing ecological and social agendas and leveraging the stray spatial consequences of preexisting infrastructures. This definition recognizes that urban centers, particularly those settled in close proximity to water, have experienced great transformation over time. As places of exchange, these cities depended on waterfront infrastructures to facilitate boat and barge traffic, but over time train lines and highways came to facilitate greater speeds of exchange. This evolution of trade and development has resulted in a patchwork layering of infrastructural systems, creating odd juxtapositions and remnant spaces between ports, city grids, train lines, roadways, and highways. Our idea of an evolutionary infrastructure does not condemn the artifacts of infrastructure or depend on an idealized blank-slate condition, but rather envisions new reciprocities between preexisting infrastructural systems and more ecologically resilient territories suited to contemporary demands.During periods of rapid urbanization, particularly after World War II, both developed and developing countries built comprehensive networks of roadways and highways to expedite movement within and beyond the core of old cities.

Politically fragile communities lacking the strength to protest this signature of progress offered little resistance to such invasive projects. Ecologically fragile waterways and contested landscapes were equally put at risk. The Cross Bronx Expressway in New York divided and devastated its neighborhood, and the Los Angeles Aqueduct system accelerated the creation of deserts to the north and impoverished countless local ecosystems along its way. Once the greatest asset to serve the modern urban landscape, infrastructure has now created cities in perpetual crisis beholden to the seemingly irreconcilable differences between its systems and its objects.

At the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in New York, an urban oasis in the middle of the city, Weiss/Manfredi designed the new Visitor Center as a linear section connecting city and garden. Nested into an existing hillside, the center is experienced as a three-dimensional continuation of the garden path system, hosting spaces for exhibitions and events and creating a new green rooftop garden. Pathways cross through the building at an upper level, and the project’s landscaped surfaces create an ambiguous boundary between garden and architectural space. (Photo by Esto/Albert Vecerka)

Realizing the limitations of monofunctional infrastructure, we advocate for a more hybrid, resilient, “thick” infrastructure, where large-scale regional ambitions do not preclude programmatic variety, spatial richness, and specificity of detail, but rather suggest an alchemy of innovative engineering, ecological imperatives, and compelling architecture. We envision the necessity of an evolutionary “model for infrastructure” – a public/private model that brings the impatience of the entrepreneurial spirit to the broader collective agendas of public agencies. Although the Ponte Vecchio in Florence offers an exemplary historic model of program-rich infrastructure, a more idiosyncratic merging of river and urban engineering was realized in Ljubljana, Slovenia, with Joze Plecnik’s responsive urban section along the Ljubljanica River. At the heart of the city, his signature triple bridge crosses the river with a spectacle of redundant crossings and delicacy of scale more common in architectural follies than infrastructure. The steep section cut is fortified with stone walls inscribed with stairs, ramps, and arcades, producing a kind of reverse fortification. Outside the urban core, these walls recline at a shallower angle, broadening the width of the river promenade with multilevel walks and water-tolerant trees. The production of this literally sub-urban promenade is both brilliant and subtle. When the river is full, only an upper level walk offers passage; when the water level is low, it follows a slender channel leaving four levels of parallel walkways free for strollers. Between these urban and pastoral states, a series of weirs and bridges create a meter of landmarks along the length of the river. This dynamically changing section accommodates natural events, merging engineering obligations with ecological agendas, and creating a hardworking infrastructure that offers a new mode of urban experience.

These very same qualities – programmatic variety and spatial richness – are part of the legacy of infrastructure-scaled modernist utopian visions and are a reminder that the legacy of modernism is complex, and its social motivations often overlooked. Le Corbusier, with his unrealized designs for Algiers and Rio de Janeiro, identified a continuous sectional hybrid of highway and housing. Hugh Ferriss, in his 1929 Metropolis series, described a vivid dream of a multileveled Manhattan, extended with tendrils of suspension bridges thick with high-rise apartments embedded in the supporting pylons. In the decades following World War II, the Metabolists, principally centered in Japan, rendered a vision of elevated cities to sustain growing urban centers. These ambitious proposals, further elaborated in the 1960s in work by Archigram and Paul Rudolph, anticipate a densely inhabited infrastructure, capable of supporting multiple layers of urban life. Though Ferriss’s inhabitable infrastructure fantasy was never realized, an awkward yet extraordinarily contingent utopia emerged in 1964 at the northern tip of Manhattan. Here, the legacy of these aspirations took shape in a piecemeal fashion, where the terminus of the George Washington Bridge translated into the dramatic cut of the Trans-Manhattan Expressway, expediting high-speed traffic movement through the city to connect the adjacent boroughs. Topped by Pier Luigi Nervi’s inventive bus station to the west and improbably straddled by four high-rise residential towers to the east, this unfinished modernist project crosses the Harlem River and carves through the Bronx with a remnant wake of on- and off-ramps. This dynamic, yet tragically flawed hybrid was internationally criticized for destroying the finer-scaled neighborhoods in Manhattan and the Bronx and commingling the exhaust of cars with the air breathed by the building’s low-income tenants. Although this marriage of infrastructure and inhabitation failed to become a contemporary paradigm worth reproducing, it was a bold experiment that prompted the Ford Foundation to commission Rudolph in 1967 to propose an elevated world of highways and housing crossing though Manhattan, complete with extensive parking garages and opportunities for residents to enjoy views of the city while avoiding direct, at grade, engagement with urban life.

Designed in collaboration with Thomas Balsley Associates and Arup, the Hunter’s Point South Waterfront Park in Queens, New York, was conceived as a resilient waterfront edge, transforming thirty acres of postindustrial waterfront in Queens into a program-rich public space that serves the Long Island City community. Surrounded by water on three sides, the design incorporates numerous sustainable initiatives, converting a strategically located but underutilized waterfront plagued by chronic disinvestment into a new urban ecological model. (Foto di Albert Vecerka)

Whereas Manhattan was the focus of both speculative and realized examples of an inhabitable infrastructure, Brooklyn is the site of one of the most enduring successes of an infrastructure hosting speed and slowness, pass-through, and promenade. In the decade after World War II, urban planner Robert Moses and the New York City Planning Commission proposed the creation of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, an element of progress that would offer efficient routes through New York City’s outer boroughs that included a cut through the historic brownstone community of Brooklyn Heights. Led by the Brooklyn Heights Association, the community countered the plan, and won, with a proposal by Clarke & Rapuano that cantilevered a two-tiered highway from the urban bluff with a surface street below. Upon seeing this plan, Moses reportedly suggested covering this proposal with a public walk lined with the backyard gardens of the adjacent town houses. The realized project, opened in 1959, included the now famous three-eighths mile long promenade, connecting the neighborhood to a shaded urban belvedere with unparalleled vistas of the Manhattan skyline. Over a half century ago, this contingent solution to a specific challenge offered a sustaining sectional paradigm, utilizing topography to eliminate the either/or dichotomy associated with urban fabric and infrastructure.

These heroic infrastructural proposals and seminal projects, seen through the dual lens of pressing ecological imperatives and shifting societal patterns, have renewed our interest in the architectural implication of topography, territory, and urban systems. The late architectural historian Detlef Mertins suggested that these types of utopian models offer relevant hybrid, multivalent, and open-ended strategies to consider in contemporary terms. Against the backdrop of these early inspirational models, we have been challenged to explore more productive relationships between infrastructure, ecology, and public life, one where the logistical obligations of movement and systems are modulated to support the “plus” of site-specific investment calibrated to the precise nuances of location and programmatic demand.

In Milan there are 54 cars for every 100 inhabitants. In Paris there are 30. In Amsterdam...

14 October 2018

Founded in 1961 by Piera Peroni Abitare magazine has crossed the history of costume, architecture and design, international, following in its pages the evolution of our ways of life and how we inhabit places